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Badger Exam 3-8 : Wisconsin's Smarter Balanced Assessment

The Badger Exam 3-8 was Wisconsin's Smarter Balanced Assessment. In 2010, Wisconsin elected to join the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of the two national consortia that were formed to help establish a series of “next generation assessments” to measure students’ career and college readiness.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) was a state-led consortium working to develop next-generation assessments that accurately measure student progress toward college- and career-readiness. Smarter Balanced was one of two multi-state consortia awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Education in 2010 to develop an assessment system aligned to the College and Career Ready Standards by the 2014-15 school year.

The components of the Smarter Balanced Assessment included:

The summative assessment was administered during the last 8 weeks of the school year (measuring students’ cumulative progress from the past school year). Smarter summative assessments were administered in English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics for grades 3-8.The ELA summative assessment consisted of Section 1 which includes a variety of selected response, constructed response, and technology enhanced items. The mathematics summative assessment consisted of two parts: Section 1 which included a variety of selected response, constructed response, and technology enhanced items; and Section 2 a performance task (PT). The summative assessment:

Accurately described both student achievement and growth of student learning as part of program evaluation and school, district, and state accountability systems;

Provided valid, reliable, and fair measures of students’ progress toward, and attainment of, the knowledge and skills required to be college- and career-ready; and

Provided an efficient and precise measurement of achievement, and quick turnaround of results.

A secure, online reporting system that provided assessment results to students, parents, teachers, and administrators. The reports generated showed student achievement and progress toward mastery of the Common Core State Standards.

Badger Exam Blueprints: Outlined the number and types of items on the Badger Exam. It also specified the number of Selected Response or Constructed Response items, depth of knowledge level for the questions and the emphasis on various skills for different grades.